RRND Email Full Text (Scheduled)

  • Amazon-owned Ring cancels Flock deal amid controversy

    Source: Silicon Republic

    “The Amazon-owned home security camera provider Ring has cancelled an upcoming partnership with Flock Safety, a surveillance tech provider to US police forces. … In a statement yesterday (12 February), Ring said that after ‘a comprehensive review,’ it found that ‘the planned Flock Safety integration would require significantly more time and resources than anticipated,’ and therefore was cancelling the partnership. The smart doorbell platform attracted controversy this week around an ad broadcast during TV coverage of the Super Bowl on 8 February publicising another Ring feature, ‘Search Party,’ which was unrelated to Flock. The ad showed multiple Ring cameras throughout a neighbourhood being activated in unison to search for a missing pet. Online criticism of the feature notes that this network of surveillance could also be used to track people.” (02/13/26)

    https://www.siliconrepublic.com/business/ring-cancels-flock-deal-amid-controversy

  • UK: High Court rules Palestine Action protest group’s designation as terrorist organization unlawful

    Source: CBS News

    “Britain’s High Court ruled Friday that the government’s decision last year to outlaw the protest group Palestine Action as a designated terrorist organization was unlawful, but it kept the ban in place pending an appeal. Judges Victoria Sharp, Jonathan Swift and Karen Steyn said ‘the nature and scale of Palestine Action’s activities’ did not meet the ‘level, scale and persistence’ that would justify proscription. The judges said they were ‘satisfied that the decision to proscribe Palestine Action was disproportionate.’ … Last year, the U.K. government declared the pro-Palestinian group a terrorist organization alongside the likes of al-Qaeda and Hamas, making membership in or support for Palestine Action a crime punishable by up to 14 years in prison. Since then, more than 2,000 people have been arrested for holding signs saying, ‘I support Palestine Action.'” (02/13/26)

    https://www.cbsnews.com/news/uk-palestine-action-terrorist-designation-unlawful-high-court-rules/


  • 1761: When American Independence was Born

    Source: Tenth Amendment Center
    by Mike Maharrey

    “‘American Independence was then & there born. John Adams wasn’t talking about July 4, 1776, and the Declaration of Independence. He was referring to the beginning of the real American Revolution that kicked off years earlier in February 1761. That’s when James Otis Jr delivered a fiery 5-hour speech railing against the writs of assistance. While the Declaration of Independence was a seminal moment in the Revolution, it was the culmination of more than 15 years of radical changes in the minds and hearts of the people that started with Otis’s speech.” (02/13/26)

    https://tenthamendmentcenter.com/2026/02/13/1761-when-american-independence-was-born/

  • Which Party Is More Libertarian: Republicans Or Democrats?

    Source: Independent Institute
    by Scott Beyer

    “Assessing the freedom and liberty orientation of both parties on 10 key issues.” (02/13/26)

    https://www.independent.org/article/2026/02/13/which-party-is-more-libertarian-republicans-or-democrats/

  • Reviving a Revisionist: Clinton Hartley Grattan, Part 2

    Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
    by Wendy McElroy

    “Grattan highlights the propagandistic tricks that were directed at those who were neutral or critical. A lack of transparency was one of the tricks that left people unsure of the facts and so unable to argue effectively against war. Closed-door negotiations epitomized this secrecy for Grattan. Why We Fought discusses in detail the secret agreements that pushed America in the direction of war and prevented effective pushback against it. For example, the American diplomat Edward Mandell (Colonel) House negotiated a covert deal with England and France by which America pledged to intervene on the side of the Allies, although the official line was neutrality. This deal became known as the Secret Treaty. Months before the agreement was finalized, however, Wilson had campaigned and won the 1916 presidential election based on the claim that he had kept America out of the war and the promise that he would continue to do so.” (02/13/26)

    https://www.fff.org/explore-freedom/article/reviving-a-revisionist-clinton-hartley-grattan-part-2/

  • The Coming Constitutional Ice Age

    Source: Judging Freedom
    by Andrew P Napolitano

    “Last fall during the opening of the United Nations in New York City, I recognized the face of a federal officer from his days working in law enforcement in New Jersey and mine as a trial judge. We chatted and I asked him what he was doing. He told me he worked for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE. I asked what ICE has to do with the U.N., and he told me that soon ICE will be everywhere. ​When I asked if ICE has become a paramilitary force, answerable to the White House, he just smiled, as if to say, ‘Don’t quote me.’ When I asked him why he was carrying two handguns and an AK-47 automatic rifle, he laughed and said, ‘I have more than you can see, judge!'” (02/13/26)

    http://judgenap.com/the-coming-constitutional-ice-age/

  • Proven Petroleum Reserves and the Myth of “Peak Oil”

    Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
    by George S Giles

    “Just how much oil does the world have? The American Petroleum Institute (API) is considered the world leader in petroleum statistics and they set the standards the worldwide industry uses. Those good old boys from Texas have created the incredible technology that brings high quality gasoline to your neighborhood each and every day. … The proven reserves of petroleum now stands at 1.7 trillion barrels of oil, up significantly from 1.3 trillion barrels in 2009. During this 17-year interlude, some 100 million barrels per day have been consumed by the world. This is clearly a paradox for the Hubbert Peak Oil believers.” (02/13/26)

    https://mises.org/power-market/proven-petroleum-reserves-and-myth-peak-oil

  • The President Of The 0.00001 Percent

    Source: The Weekly Dish
    by Andrew Sullivan

    “Ah yes, those famous Trump family values: money, power, rape. And once the money landed in the Trump crypto accounts, of course, government policy changed. Trump gave the UAE rare and advanced AI chips, brought the UAE into the US Stargate AI project — along with an ownership slice of TikTok — and pardoned the sleazy billionaire felon, Changpeng Zhao, who had helped seal the deal with WLF. Not just corruption, but possibly at the expense of our national security, if those UAE chips make it to the CCP. This is the real Epstein class: utterly amoral networkers and nepotists with no loyalties to anything but their absurd bank balances and party invitations. And this is their administration.” (02/13/26)

    https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/the-president-of-the-000001-percent-36e

  • Worry, Don’t Panic, Over Trump’s Efforts to Subvert the Elections

    Source: The UnPopulist
    by Andy Craig

    “Donald Trump and his administration are waging an unprecedented, multi-pronged attack on this year’s midterm congressional elections. Even compared to his attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, the scope and severity of this assault is unprecedented. Despite all this, most — if not all — of these lines of attack will fail. They are built on magical thinking, pursued by people who lack basic understanding of how these things work. Some of these threats are more serious and pressing. But there can be a temptation to doomerism that we should reject. Trump is dangerous, but he is not omnipotent.” (02/13/26)

    https://www.theunpopulist.net/p/worry-dont-panic-over-trumps-efforts

  • Immigration vs. Settler Colonialism

    Source: Free Association
    by Sheldon Richman

    “The people performing those mind-boggling contortions to justify, on libertarian grounds, state violence against migrants without papers — restrictatarians, I call them — cite a 1994 article by Murray Rothbard (1926-1995) in support of their double-jointed acrobatics. Rothbard was correct about many things, but a position is not correct merely because Rothbard held it. I expect no disagreement over that.” (02/13/26)

    https://sheldonfreeassociation.blogspot.com/2026/02/tgif-immigration-vs-settler-colonialism.html

  • Time to stop ICE’s efforts to “defenestrate” the Constitution

    Source: Orange County Register
    by Steven Greenhut

    “In authoritarian Russia, critics of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine have an odd habit of falling out of windows. These likely acts of defenestration serve as a stark warning for other critics, although the official line is usually that they tripped or committed suicide. In the democratic United States, opponents of ICE agents in Minneapolis sometimes also meet unusual fates. For instance, court documents show that ICE agents claimed Mexican immigrant Alberto Castañeda Mondragón experienced bone fractures and head injuries after he ‘purposefully ran headfirst into a brick wall’ — an explanation that was disputed by the medical staff …. the Trump administration’s outrageous whoppers regarding myriad ICE incidents — that, say, victims of ICE violence were insurrectionists or terrorists — are a loyalty test. The more preposterous the claim, the more it separates blind MAGA followers from everyone else. The distortions echo the Kremlin’s approach: they’re a warning to its foes.” (02/13/26)

    https://www.ocregister.com/2026/02/13/steven-greenhut-time-to-stop-ices-efforts-to-defenestrate-the-constitution/

  • When speech no longer seems sufficient, part II

    Source: Expression
    by Samuel J Abrams

    “Last week, I wrote that students are beginning to treat speech as insufficient, as though persuasion is a kind of performance and disruption or violence is the only thing that works. I shared my own attempt to explain this to my students. But that lesson didn’t go as I had hoped. I left that class unsettled, and more than a little upset, realizing that so many of my students seem unmoved by the premise that words are a better alternative to force. I promised myself I would go back and try again. … I went prepared. I took more than moral exhortation. I took the best empirical record we have about political change. And I left feeling unsure that my students had even heard me.” (02/13/26)

    https://expression.fire.org/p/when-speech-no-longer-seems-sufficient-e3f

  • Amazon’s Ring and Google’s Nest Unwittingly Reveal the Severity of the US Surveillance State

    Source: Glenn Greenwald
    by Glenn Greenwald

    “That the U.S. Surveillance State is rapidly growing to the point of ubiquity has been demonstrated over the past week by seemingly benign events. While the picture that emerges is grim, to put it mildly, at least Americans are again confronted with crystal clarity over how severe this has become. The latest round of valid panic over privacy began during the Super Bowl held on Sunday. During the game, Amazon ran a commercial for its Ring camera security system. The ad manipulatively exploited people’s love of dogs to induce them to ignore the consequences of what Amazon was touting. It seems that trick did not work.” (02/13/26)

    https://greenwald.substack.com/p/amazons-ring-and-googles-nest-unwittingly

  • Remembering Ed Crane

    Source: Foundation for Economic Educataion
    by Daniel J Mitchell

    “Ed Crane, the self-described Beloved Founder of the Cato Institute, passed away on February 10. He should be remembered first and foremost as an institution builder. In his 30-plus years as President of Cato, Ed took libertarian ideas from the fringe to the mainstream. That was no trivial accomplishment, given that so many of us in the liberty movement are nonconformists (organizing libertarians is akin to herding cats).” (02/13/26)

    https://fee.org/articles/remembering-ed-crane/

  • Is the MAHA Movement Building a Genuine Counter-Elite?

    Source: Brownstone Institute
    by Renaud Beauchard

    “As the entire world is having a temper tantrum over the most recent Epstein case revelations about our discredited elites – obsessing over the power networks, the private jets, the bank accounts in the Virgin Islands, the French ministers, the European royalty, the foreign intelligence agencies, etc. – I’m having an entirely different epiphany. And, strangely, a flicker of hope. The rot on display is hard to take your eyes away from, but I find myself thinking more about what might rise in its place. I’m not talking about another faction of whip-crackers wearing better suits or pushing slicker slogans, but a quieter bunch, who appear to have the capacity to generate moral assent to a new political formula. That new elite prototype has started to take shape inside the MAHA movement. It might not yet be a fully formed counter-elite, but it certainly looks like a promising kind of one.” (02/13/26)

    https://brownstone.org/articles/is-the-maha-movement-building-a-genuine-counter-elite/

  • The Politics of Hate: Weaponized Discord Is the Deep State’s Most Effective Tool

    Source: CounterPunch
    by John W Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead

    “This country was built on the radical idea that government exists to serve the people — not to control them, monitor them, manage them, or rule over them. That idea is being systematically dismantled by a Deep State determined to entrench its power at our expense by keeping the nation divided, distracted, and perpetually at war with itself. This is what happens when those in power discover that a divided people are easier to manipulate than a united one — and that hate is not a byproduct of politics, but one of its most effective weapons. This nation is being destabilized by forces that masquerade as political movements, but dig down deep, and you’ll find that power and greed work the same no matter which party hat they wear. The ‘politics of hate’ is a bipartisan tool.” (02/13/26)

    https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/02/13/the-politics-of-hate-weaponized-discord-is-the-deep-states-most-effective-tool/

  • The ATF Created a Backdoor Gun Registry. Lawmakers Want an Explanation.

    Source: Reason
    by JD Tuccille

    “It has been illegal since 1986 for the federal government to establish a national firearms registry. As you might expect of the sort of people who gravitate to government employment, the bureaucrats at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), enabled by Biden-era policy changes, have taken that as a challenge. Now, members of Congress want answers from the federal gun cops about a vast gun registry database that could threaten the liberty and privacy of firearms owners. They have been stonewalled so far.” (02/13/26)

    https://reason.com/2026/02/13/the-atf-created-a-backdoor-gun-registry-lawmakers-want-an-explanation/

  • An Exercise in Paternal Piety

    Source: Law & Liberty
    by Gage Klipper

    “The concept of ‘filial piety’ is as old as Western civilization itself. From The Oresteia to Virgil’s Aeneid and Shakespeare’s King Lear, generational continuity has hinged on the children’s hierarchical duty to honor, obey, and sometimes even avenge their parents. But in the modern era, where individualism reigns, hierarchy is all but leveled, and historical change can occur within one generation, generational obligation feels more mutual. In literature, Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev was among the first to notice this shift.” (02/13/26)

    https://lawliberty.org/an-exercise-in-paternal-piety/

  • Trump’s Cuba Policy Is a Humanitarian Disaster

    Source: The American Conservative
    by Ted Snider

    “On January 25, 1960, President Dwight D. Eisenhower proposed a U.S. naval ‘quarantine’ of Cuba. ‘If they are hungry,’ the president fumed, ‘they will throw Castro out.’ His ambassador to Cuba, Philip W. Bonsal, chided him with a moral reminder: ‘We should not punish the whole Cuban people for the acts of one abnormal man.’ If it was hard for the U.S. to hear that restraint then, it has become deaf to it now. For over 65 years, U.S. policy has been to employ an embargo to pressure Cuba until the regime collapses. … Despite the decades of economic and personal suffering, the policy has failed. The embargo has brought Cuba misery but not regime change. And yet, in the absence of a more promising plan, the Trump administration seems intent on simply intensifying the current plan. The result will not be regime change but more suffering.” (02/13/26)

    https://www.theamericanconservative.com/trumps-cuba-policy-is-a-humanitarian-disaster/